The Uninhabitable EarthFamine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

...It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century...

The relatively easy measures required to prevent disaster, had we acted ~30 years ago, now require much more immediate and drastic action:

These experts say we have three years to get climate change under control. And they’re the optimists.

A group of prominent scientists, policymakers, and corporate leaders released a statement Wednesday warning that if the world doesn’t set greenhouse gas emissions on a downward path by 2020, it could become impossible to contain climate change within safe limits.

The group, led by Christiana Figueres, who oversaw the United Nations negotiations that produced the Paris climate agreement, base their case on simple math. The world, they calculate, probably has a maximum of 600 billion remaining tons of carbon dioxide that can be emitted if we want a good chance of holding the rise in planetary temperatures within the Paris limit of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

With 41 billion tons emitted every year from energy consumption and other sources, such as deforestation, there are only about 15 years before that budget is exhausted.

Emissions can’t suddenly go to zero after 15 years — the world economy would grind to a halt if they did. Therefore, they must be put on a downward path almost immediately...

Some tools for planning your future as a North American Climate refugee:

As Climate Changes, SouthernStates Will Suffer More Than Others

As the United States confronts global warming in the decades ahead, not all states will suffer equally. Maine may benefit from milder winters. Florida, by contrast, could face major losses, as deadly heat waves flare up in the summer and rising sea levels eat away at valuable coastal properties.

In a new study in the journal Science, researchers analyzed the economic harm that climate change could inflict on the United States in the coming century. They found that the impacts could prove highly unequal: states in the Northeast and West would fare relatively well, while parts of the Midwest and Southeast would be especially hard hit.

In all, the researchers estimate that the nation could face damages worth 0.7 percent of gross domestic product per year by the 2080s for every 1 degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature. But that overall number obscures wide variations: The worst-hit counties — mainly in states that already have warm climates, like Arizona or Texas — could see losses worth 10 to 20 percent of G.D.P. or more if emissions continue to rise unchecked...

From the mean daily temperature to the number of days with precipitation over 1”, the NOAA Climate Explorer has a scientific way to see how climate change will affect where you live.What is the Climate Explorer? In short, it’s a crystal ball created by our friends at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to show what the future may be like for the United States, depending on whether we act on climate or continue emitting greenhouse gases.The Climate Explorer accomplishes this by instantly displaying interactive maps and graphs that visualize recorded and projected climate change impacts across the United States.Climate Explorer’s graphs and maps show projected conditions for two possible futures: one in which humans make a moderate attempt to reduce global emissions of heat-trapping gases, and one in which we go on conducting business as usual. NOAA makes these predictions based on global climate models developed for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...

edatoakrun wrote:In case you missed them some recent articles on-topic.

The story below has been widely attacked as being alarmist.

The Uninhabitable EarthFamine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.

...It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century...

Everybody needs to read that article and understand that the criticisms of it are 99% due to tone, not content or inaccurate representation of scientific data - including Manning's criticism. We can't for sure, but there's a good chance we might actually be totally fucked right now regardless of what we do. We even stand to see serious climate impacts in our lifetimes, at this point - not cities permanently under water, but people whose homes flood during every thunderstorm moving away from the coasts jobless, homeless, and desperate.

I may be a leftie, but I think it's a universal sentiment among thinking people that society has a very thin veneer, one that can be pierced surprisingly easily by hard times.

The Doomsday Clock just moved: It’s now 2 minutes to ‘midnight,’ the symbolic hour of the apocalypse

Alexa, what time is the apocalypse?

Ulp.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the symbolic Doomsday Clock a notch closer to the end of humanity Thursday, moving it ahead by 30 seconds after what the organization called a “grim assessment” of the state of geopolitical affairs.

“As of today,” Bulletin president Rachel Bronson told reporters, “it is two minutes to midnight.”

In moving the clock 30 seconds closer to the hour of the apocalypse, the group cited “the failure of President Trump and other world leaders to deal with looming threats of nuclear war and climate change.”

The organization — whose board includes 15 Nobel Laureates — now believes “the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago; it is as threatening as it has been since World War II,” Bulletin officials Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert Rosner wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post. “In fact, the Doomsday Clock is as close to midnight today as it was in 1953, when Cold War fears perhaps reached their highest levels.”...

All these articles about the end of the world are laughable. It's like the days when we did human sacrifices and burned people at the stake...

The whole issue of global warming is a question of "Direct Causality", meaning can you REALLY attribute global warming (and the supposed terror that it will bring) directly to human behavior? The answer must be no... Because many other things can be affecting measurable earth changes (not just warming).

Conversely, can we be so bold and self-centered that we can STOP or even reverse global warming with anything we do at this time?? Again, the answer must be no.. Even if you got every human being on earth to stop driving cars, there is no evidence that global warming can be stopped in 10-20 years.

Like it or not, our earth is facing an even grander problem.. The end of Oil.. Oil is the best source of power that man has ever found, and there really is no equal replacement. Due to the efficiency of oil use, the population of the earth will continue to grow geometrically, and the further use of oil will also grow geometrically. The Genie is out of the bottle. What mankind's true problem is how to slow down the growth of petroleum use in order to give us time to find alternate power sources to oil.

I have read much on this topic, and suggest others to investigate the topic of "Peak Oil".

Not only is sea level rising, it is rising at an increasing amount each year, found a hugely important study of global sea level published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era, looked at 25 years of satellite-based global sea level measurements taken by four satellites. The researchers found that global sea levels rose by an average of 3 millimeters per year, plus or minus 0.4 mm/yr, but this rate has been accelerating by 0.084 ± 0.025 mm/y2 over the past 25 years. If this acceleration were to continue through the end of the century, global sea level rise between 2005 and 2100 would be about 26 inches (65 centimeters), which is more than double the rise of 11 inches (28 centimeters) that would occur if sea level rise stayed constant at 3 mm/yr...Future sea level rise likely to be higher

The scientists commented that their estimate might represent a conservative lower bound on future sea level change, since rapid changes in the stability of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could be expected to cause higher accelerations of sea level rise in the future. They added: “In contrast, few potential processes exist to suggest that this estimate is too high.”...

The forlorn hope that melting glacial ice elsewhere might be redistributed to a final redoubt of stability, East Antarctica, seems to be increasingly ruled out by the latest consensus report.

And so it goes, the the last significant possibility of averting catastrophically rapid sea level rise is rapidly evaporating:

Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble.

Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday.

The melt rate has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realized, leaving low-lying cities and communities with less time to prepare than they had hoped.

The result also reinforces that nations have a short window — perhaps no more than a decade — to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if they hope to avert some of the worst consequences of climate change.

Antarctica, the planet’s largest ice sheet, lost 219 billion tons of ice annually from 2012 through 2017 — approximately triple the 73 billion-ton melt rate of a decade ago, the scientists concluded. From 1992 through 1997, Antarctica lost 49 billion tons of ice annually.

The study is the product of a large group of Antarctic experts who collectively reviewed 24 recent measurements of Antarctic ice loss, reconciling their differences to produce the most definitive figures yet on changes in Antarctica. Their results — known formally as the “Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise” (IMBIE) — were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“We took all the estimates across all the different techniques, and we got this consensus,” said Isabella Velicogna, an Antarctic expert at the University of California at Irvine and one of the many authors from institutions in 14 countries. The lead author was Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in England...

The largest part of the continent, East Antarctica, has remained more stable and did not contribute much melt to the ocean during the period of study, the assessment says. However, in the past five years, it too has begun to lose ice, perhaps as much as 28 billion tons per year, although the uncertainty surrounding this number remains high.

What’s happening in East Antarctica is important because it has, by far, the most ice to give, being capable of raising sea levels by well over 100 feet. A single East Antarctic glacier, Totten, has the potential to unleash as much total sea-level rise as the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, or more...